Wednesday, August 31, 2011

As you can see this is after phase one of the foyer and my remaining plans.

I have made and hung a message board as seen here and now we are on to the calendar.

First I want to say I stole a quick idea from one of my friends she found these fabulous bingo markers at a local scrap book store and I knew I needed to use them when I made my own calendar TY Suzanne!!!

I covered them in gel stain:

and rubbed it off using a paper towel and in some places a wooden skewer until they looked like this:

I added neomodymium magnets to the back using E6000 glue(if you use hot glue the magnets will rip right off the backs so use the E6000)

I used the same glue and magnets for the scrabble tiles to make the months(this is the list of letters you will need to make all the months-2a, 2o, 3e, 1i, 2u, 1b, 1c, 1d, 1f, 1g, 1h, 1j, 1l, 1m, 1n, 1p, 1r,1s,1v,1y) As you can see we have a prankster in our midst:

Here is the finished calendar which was prepurchased at Staples(and to be honest and in the time it took me to find just what I wanted I probably could have scrounged up the materials to make one). I also added magnets to the back of vintage dominos with all the numbers on the individual dominos adding to 6 the amount of people in our family. The jute holder is just a can wrapped in jute with magnets glued to the back(thanks to Suzanne for making that for me). The can holds the extra numbers and letters and also some dry erase markers.

Here is the foyer now:

I had wanted a place to put umbrellas and looky what I found for 3 whole dollars at a garage sale...perfection!!!!

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

I had a vision for a message board made out of salvaged red barn wood and after several attempts at obtaining such wood close to home ended in failure I had resigned myself to waiting until October when I would travel to the town I knew had it and make my message board then. Fate however intervened and by chance I went to our old house to do some work and during this time I was there I needed to take my younger son to the school for his kindergarten evalution and drove past this:

I passed it twice and went home and then it occured to me go get it, it is exactly what you need. My husband has learned to trust me now when I say I need to pick something up off the side of the road and so we jumped inthe truck and picked it up.

I painted it vintage white and brought it into the house:

ugghh too yellow and out it went to be painted a distressed blue....

nope this did not work either so back outside it went and

then I painted it antique white brought it in and loved it!

SO much so we added chicken wire and canvas to the door:

This was easily accomplished with a staple gun. First we laid our the chicken wire(wear gloves) on the back of the door and found the line we were going to staple down pulling it taut as we went along and then went to the side straight across and did the same thing and then to the other 2 sides this went relativly quickly and then we moved on to the canvas doing the same thing and this too went along quickly.

Then I wanted to make 2 magnet boards covered in canvas. I went to our local sheet metal place and they cut it to my exact measurements(I did learn something I would have had him cut one big piece instead of 2 smaller ones in retrospect but the 2 did work)

Then we sprayed the shee tmetal with adhesive and covered it quickly with canvas.

As you can see above we had the canvas rolled up and then we just unrolled it over the sticky surface rubbing it flat as we went along.

We then used good old duct tape, we had red available from another project and taped the 2 magnet boards in place on the back of the door:

We took in the house and I near died the canvas looked pink and the paint looked yellow. This is when I almost decided to have a bonfire in the back yard and this door/message board was going to be the guest of honor.

After a good nights sleep I decided I would carefully paint it red and try not to paint the canvas(I actually did in one spot okay 2 but I dare you to try to find them)

and in it went and I realize from this picture now it might have looked pink but it wasn't until I drug it back in the house that the bonfire was on again so I slept on it again and ran the next day to the store and bought some stain and I am glad I did. I stained the whole thing, distressed it up a bit, added hangers and felt circles to the back, added the hooks and the handle back on and brought it into the house and this time it has found a place to stay. Take a look:

Here is the magnet board side. I found cute magnets that look like push pins to add to the magnet board.

Here is the center section which I left alone. I hung a hook from the wall and hung a canning jar(to hang a canning jar you get some wire I used black and make a loop whatever size you want and then you wrap the wire around the jar lip until you get back to the loop and then wrap around the loop and then go back around the jar the other way do this several times until you run out of wire the jar should be able to hang from the loop on the back after 3 times of going around the jar with the wire) from the hook and added some flowers to it.

Here is the message board and I found little clothes pins to hang messages from the chicken wire.

Here it is hanging over my bench in the foyer:

I am so glad I was unable to obtain barn wood because this turned out even better than my first original vision and I LOVE it!!! I am glad I didn't have a bonfire that is for sure!

Friday, August 19, 2011

School is going to start in 2 short weeks and with that I realized that we needed to have our new home a bit more organized for the children so that their school days could begin and end with the least amount of stress possible. It has been quite a balancing act as far as making sure we spend time with the children since the summer is coming to an end, getting our old home ready to sell and getting this one ready for school to start and unpacked(livable).

The first order of business was a command center of sorts for the children. I have one planned in the kitchen for myself and theirs will help me as well but this is for them to keep their life organized. We have 2 foyers. When you walk in our front door there is a foyer straight ahead and then to the right there is this one:

We call it the Mudroom Foyer. The door to the right is the door to the garage-it is magnetic and will soon receive a coat of chalkboard paint. The door to the left is the laundry room and there is also a door you can't see that is a small bathroom. Straight ahead is a small coat closet and we actually have another larger coat closet in the entrance foyer(I am actually really excited about 2 coat closets because in our old house we had 0 yep ZERO).

I added this farmhouse bench we already had to the one wall and placed this rather modern rug in front of it.

and then underneath the bench I added these old apple crates( they were $3 each at a local orchard can you say cha ching):

I quickly in a old fashioned stencil font added shoes here with some cardinal red paint and felt circles to the bottom of the crates so there would be no snaging of the rug or scratching of the floor.

Step one complete. It took less than 10 minutes but it has already added storage and a place to sit to put your shoes on and off. The other great thing is when we have visitors they can put their shoes inthe crates as well.

Here is a sneak peak of the future projects for the room:

Oh yeah and one more little note see the flooring...it used to be a falling apart laminate, which ran into a 1990 vinyl with scratches, stains and peeling up in places in the kitchen and then the connecting family room(which has an entrance to deck off of it) had tan stained carpet and the dining room had cream colored carpet. With that being said this was the first order of business. It really helped with the flow of the house and made every room seem bigger and more cohesive.

This is our new home and it looks like it is nesteld right in the middle of the country but it's not! See the shadow in the bottom corner of the picture it is from a 35 ft pine tree by the end of our driveway in matter of fact it has a twin on the other side of the driveway. We have a huge apple tree in the back yard and a family of bunnies we watch every morning and evening and we are loving it here.

This house screams rustic and I am one to love rustic things I however my taste is not just rustic. I love modern and traditional as well. This is were I ran into a creative dilemma. How was I going to mash rustic, modern, and traditional together??? As I was trying to decide how I was going to move forward with decorating it I started searching blogs and pinterest and came up with some ideas that I was almost sure could work. I however am not a interior decorator and often snag the eyes of friends to help me figure things out. This time however short of coming up with a color pallet and asking friends for help with that I was going it alone(simply because I think they would all think I have gone crazy). I continued to struggle with the concept and I just didn't want to end up spending time and money on a concept that absolutely would look like a hot mess in the end. As I was ready to throw in the towel on the whole idea simply because I was doubting myself so much what would happen to pop into my google reader but this article at Centsational Girl written by one of Kate's contributors Michelle. THE NEW RUSTIC!!! Who knew?, apparently me but I had no idea. Suddenly I had this new boost of confidence that my ideas would work so over the next what will probably be several years I will be sharing my take on New Rustic. I of course will still share fun ideas I do with my children but we will have some house projects along the way as well!

Monday, August 15, 2011

It is interesting when you move because you are trying to figure out how to use your old stuff in a new space. I had these shelves:

in my laundry room before but they didn't work in my new one so I just set the shelf inthe garage and then one day I went to my favorite dollar shop and saw these baskets so I bought 5 and they fit perfect. Well as things go in a few days they were completely unorganized I had chalk in the bubbles, bubbles in with the jump ropes..I knew I needed to come up with some way to label them but I wanted them to be water proof. Then I saw this post and I was inspired. I quickly whipped up 5 labels using scrapbook paper and stickers, you could print them off from the computer or use stamps too to make the words. Then I used the so easy to use scotch laminating pouches to protect from bubble solution, water, dirt etc I then hole punched the top and used hemp rope(it won't get ruined if it gets wet or dirty) to tie them to the baskets.

It has been a entire week and guess what they have stayed completely organized..LOVE IT!!!!

Friday, August 12, 2011

In the midst of moving and getting one house ready to sell I was finding myself well a bit grumpy and drained. My husband kindly pointed out that Julia with a project is a happy Julia and so I took a break from packing, unpacking, touch up painting and cleaning and started working on a project.

When we were first married we wrote a family constitution. We wrote down things that we wanted to see our family doing and typed it up in a consitution style and it adorned our wall for the last almost 10 years. We now have 3 more children and so we asked them what they would like to see our family doing and I wrote a list of the things they said and then I wrote a secondary list that brought them altogether so my project wouldn't look like a jumbled mess of words. Now that I havve explained the why of the project lets get to the how of it.

First you are going to need to collect some pallets. I am lucky enough to have a husband that works in retail so he was able to snag some up for me and he broke them down for me too...Yahoo Hubby! I ended up with a pile of boards like this:

Next removing all the nails and staples. I used a Dremel and a good ole hammer for this part:

Then to cut the boards to size. I measured the wall I was going to hang it on and cut my longest board 4 inches shorter than that with the other boards being cut 4 and 8 inches shorter that the longest boards. I cut them using a jigsaw and cut a bunch of boards in different lengthes.....

like this:

I moved them around until I was happy with the arrangement.

This was the most time consuming part figuring out what words where, what fonts, what sizes for the fonts and then cutting out the words onto vinyl with my silhouette. Once that was done I adhered the letters or the frame around the letters to the boards like so:

If it had the letters I painted the whole board and rapidly removed the vinyl and if it had the cut outs of the words I just painted that in using a stencil brush.

Once dry I flipped all the boards over and liquid nailed and nailed these 2 strips of wood to hold it all together, added hangers, and foam pads(so not to ding the walls) and it was ready to hang.......

I absolutely LOVE how it turned out and am glad when you enter my home this is what you see:

Sunday, August 7, 2011

We made these cute little guys while we were camping the night we went to the beach to see the sunset. The children loved flying them around on the way to the beach.

You Need:

Craft foam-we used glittery

Glue Dots

Googly Eyes

Permanent Marker

Glow Stick

Used Water Bottle

To Make:

Cut craft foam into wings glue on to top of bottle

Glue eyes on

Draw a mouth on using marker

Break your glow stick and insert into water bottle

screw back on lid

It was that easy and we had an unexpected thing happen, when we were walking back to our campsite in the dark the fireflies loved us. They were actually following us as we were walking it was sooo cool and the kids were thrilled!

I asked my soon to be 9 year old what kind of birthday party he would like and to my shock he said "under water sea creatures!" I was actually excited for a moment with visions of the most fabulous cake and then that vision was ended with the following addition of "and I want my cake shaped like a manta ray" a what? A manta ray! I knew what they were but now instead of the excitement I intially felt I was in a stuppor of thought of how was I going to pull that off a manta ray cake...hmmm...well read on to see how it all turned out.

Here is the door we decorated together with 3 different colors of blue crepe paper for the water and then some green for the kelp. We added fish from our local school store to finish it off.

The Manta Ray Cake

My hubby was out of town and he is our resident shape cake maker so I emailed him a quick note: think of how you are going to make a manta ray cake. He shapes the cake and I decorate them we are a good team that way. The only problem was since we are inbetween 2 houses currently and lots of things like icing coloring are still in boxes I was without my black food coloring so we have a white manta ray but I think he turned out good. I did have some blue to make the water and some carmel pecan frosting for the sand and chocolate rocks(not in picture). I found these cute candles and added a molded out of airheads tail and tada a manta ray cake!

I decided we needed some balloons and so our jellyfish forest was created:

Sea Urchins in a Jar anyone?

Sitting around I had littel fish bowls or buckets of swedish fish, goldfish crackers, and gummi worms!